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<TITLE>TODAY: JAMAICA KINCAID @ 4:30pm</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'>This event is today. Please publicize. See you all. Thank you. Emmanuel<BR>
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</SPAN><FONT SIZE="7"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:26.0px'><B>JAMAICA KINCAID<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><FONT SIZE="5"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:18.0px'>Thursday, February 16, 2006<BR>
4:30 pm<BR>
Sterling Memorial Library<BR>
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Critically acclaimed author Jamaica Kincaid will read selections from her latest book <I>Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya </I>in the Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall on Thursday February 16th at 4:30pm. <BR>
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Jamaica Kincaid was born as Elaine Potter Richardson in Antigua on May 25th, 1949. At the age of seventeen, she left the island and her family to embark on a new life in the United States. She worked first in Westchester, New York as an au pair for an upper class family. She then proceeded to study photography at the New School for Social Research and also spent a year at Franconia College in New Hampshire. She changed her name in 1973 to Jamaica Kincaid, following her family’s disapproval of her writing. <BR>
Her first writing experience was a series of articles and stories for <I>Ingenue</I> magazine including her first published short story, Girl which became part of the collection <I>At the Bottom of the River</I> published in 1983. Her first novel, <I>Annie John</I>, followed in 1985. It was through connections at <I>Ingenue</I> magazine that she became acquainted with William Shawn, Editor of the <I>New Yorker</I> magazine. He offered her a job and for almost twenty years, she was a regular contributor to the <I>New Yorker</I> magazine, writing articles for the Talk of the Town section that were published in 2001 as <I>Talk Stories.</I> Among her essays, novels and memoirs are <I>A Small Place </I>(1988), <I>Lucy </I>(1990), <I>The Autobiography of My Mother</I> (1996), <I>My Brother</I> (1997), <I>My Garden</I> (Book) (1999) and <I>Mr. Potter</I> (2002). Her most recent book is <I>Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya</I>, which recounts her seed col!
lecting expedition in Asia. After more than three decades of writing, she continues to be one of the most original and eloquent voices in American literature. She divides her time between Vermont, where she shares a home with her husband, the composer Allen Shawn and their two children, and Boston, where she teaches at Harvard University’s English Department. <BR>
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A reception will immediately follow the talk in the Library’s Memorabilia Room, adjacent to the Lecture Hall. <BR>
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<B>Both the reading and the reception are free and open to the public.<BR>
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</SPAN><FONT SIZE="2"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:10.0px'>The event is generously sponsored by several campus groups, including African American Studies, the Afro-American Cultural Center, Agrarian Studies, American Studies, Calhoun College Master’s Office, Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies, James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, English, Sterling Memorial Library, Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity, Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and the Whitney Humanities Center’s Working Group on Nationalisms and Empires. <BR>
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contact: emmanuel.raymundo@yale.edu</SPAN></FONT><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'><BR>
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